‘No paramilitaries’ among Bosnian Serbs, leader says

The photographs showed more than a dozen tough-looking men posing in military fatigues, staring sternly at a camera, reportedly part of a pro-Russian paramilitary unit. Taken on the streets of Banja Luka, the capital of the Serb half of Bosnia, the pictures emerged in January, prompting Bosnian intelligence authorities to begin an investigation amid claims of Russian efforts to destabilise the Balkans. Three months on, the Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik sits back in his ornate office chair and calmly dismisses the claims about pro-Russian forces as “lies”. “In Republika Srpska, there are no paramilitary units,” Dodik, the president of the Serb-run entity in Bosnia, tells AFP. “If there was one, I would not be in this seat anymore.” The region called Republika Srpska, together with the separate Muslim-Croat Federation, make up the multi-ethnic country of Bosnia and Herzegovina, part of the former Yugoslavia. Each has its own president, government, parliament and police force. Dodik, who first came to power in 1998, was initially close to Western countries which viewed him as a moderate. But numerous disagreements, including a campaign to celebrate a Serbian-focused holiday last year — viewed as a means to undermine the country’s central authority in Sarajevo — has seen relations sour. The United States imposed sanctions on Dodik in January 2017 for undermining the 1995 Dayton peace agreement, the deal which ended Bosnia’s war. Dodik has since made overtures towards Russia’s Vladimir Putin, whom he hopes to meet in the run-up to this year’s Bosnian elections…. [Read full story]